No, really.
Sometimes I think my way of making artwork is a bit like a sort of mathematical process, where I start off with an interesting expression and try it out with other interesting expressions to see what the outcome will be. Just like that, I'm hoping for products that will solve or partially elucidate other, further problems, and like my imaginary mathematician, I'm drawn towards the most elegant solutions, and feel the urge to whittle off the ugly nubs that won't fit into my streamlined vision. While there are probably further analogies to be drawn in the working-out of proofs and the processes used to validate and analyse the mathematician's efforts and my own, I'm not getting into them just yet.
What I do find interesting is the sense of play and unjudging
experimentation this image conjures. I'm expecting something, but I'm
prepared for something else, too, and it often surprises me. This
happens when I
a: write my way into a text
b: pursue an analogy for its own sake to see what the model can tell me
c: use exotic filters in photoshop
d: put one picture next to another
e: find out some new historical thread to my researches
f: have another look after a cup of tea
and so on. Moments of epiphany, perhaps.
The atom-smashing bit comes out of the thought that what I'm doing
is whirling carefully-selected and sometimes quite tightly controlled
ideas at one another to see what comes out: there's the famous "fruit
salad" analogy in particle-acceleration speak, which says there's lots
of stuff (subatomic particles, novelties) produced but lots of research
depends on knowing how to look and what you expect... but, very
importantly, not always.
Another problem that I've been thinking about is the one of
meaningfulness. This is something that I've kept off my back by making
books, and I think that the practice itself has been a sort of critical
tool. A sort of big analogy: I will explain. Lots of artists and other
theory eaters have cause to complain that without a sense of truth and
validity of feeling etc, it's quite impossible to make meaningful
statements. I also come across the complaint that with no controlling
narratives to cling to, the field of possibility for art is hopelessly
vast.
I found that I coped, quite by accident, with this, by ignoring its
ramifications...or, more pertinently, by eliding my expectations of the
artwork. I did this by choosing to make books, which did two things.
A: It gave the work a physical boundary and a base form that I would work out from.
B: It gave me a cultural norm to depend on.
Both of these things have to be taken in the sense I used them- as
temporary structures (of which, more later). Of course, they are also
inter-related and serve one another, too.
By choosing books, I am choosing a form with powerful expectations
appended to it. We expect, with the strongest possible faith, that
books will give us a continuous narrative and have a particular
sequence and so on. Knowing that, I can choose how to work with it or
confound it. Either way, I'm depending on the notional book: the social
construction of the book.
The book is also a structure complete within itself. We are quite
used to books being complete within themselves ( or certainly, we feel
that way, even if it is a fallacy). We are quite used to suspending our
critical faculties to entertain notions of fantastic spaceships and
unlikely love stories in fiction. We pretend in them, that we can peer
inside others' motivations as well. All this is the successful
accomplishment of the novel, which goes on being, even if we are now
aware of how the insides leak out into the world and vice versa. Of
course, it was always thus, and that didn't stop anyone writing
meaningful fictions. What writing a novel, making a book, or in the
wider sense making a finite work of art does, is to limit the
responsibilities of the artifact. By limiting the physical boundaries
and eliding the cultural expectations demanded of the object one is
creating a temporary structure.
Such structure can withstand varying degrees of critical buffeting,
like all theories. ( The allusion is to the critical rigour of
scientific theories, with the difference that the artist does not look
to falsify their theory, rather they are-I think-most likely to publish
the most interesting result). The use of the artwork is as a critical
tool, as an analogy itself, to be used in the next cycle of
atom-smashing.
Working in books, is for me, working in temporary structures. each
book is a temporary home for my practice and has its own microclimate.
There is a pun here, too. Since most of my subject matter comes from
the retelling or refiguring of historical events, they are also
temporal structures. And since they are also narrative pieces,
controlling the viewer's experience of time through the narrative, they
are again temporal structures.
This is an untidy piece of writing, and has many problems, but these are some of the ways I think about `artistic practice.
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